Crank Old Guys Club

This meeting of the cranky old guys club is now called to order. (Sound of gavel pounding)

It’s true. Stuff that I would have shrugged off a mere 5 (or possibly 10) years ago now annoys the s*** out of me. 

Examples? Ooooooh, have I got examples.

•    Sequels to movies that were turkeys in the first place. Exhibit A—The Thomas Crown Affair. The original was a ho-hum thriller with the always phlegmatic Steve McQueen and the monotone mumbler Ali McGraw. The remake starred the sleek and emotionless Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, who makes even Ali look animated.

• Speaking of movies, why do we have to sit through a dozen trailers, seven commercials and a 20 minute whoring of television shows to get to the featured movie? It’s enough to put a guy off his popcorn.

• High tech golf gadgets. Here’s a typical conversation on the golf course with me and Mr. GPS.

Mr. GPS: How far do you think it is from here to the hole? 

Me:(Eyeballing 150 yard post and flagstick) Maybe 165 yards.

 Mr. GPS:  Wrong! It’s 167.4587 yards.

 Me:  Great! I wouldn’t want to make a big mistake and swing my 165 yard club and come up  2.4587 yards short.      

                           

The average weekend golfer is not even sure he will hit the ball, let alone know exactly how far he’s going to hit it. I vote to restrict GPS usage to those who want to get hopelessly lost in a strange city when a road map could have told them where to go.

• People who constantly take big risks by zooming from lane to lane in gridlocked traffic. Got news for you, pal. When we finally make it to the Interstate Bridge, you’re going to be right beside me again. With some luck you'll get to your destination 2.4587 seconds earlier than if you'd just cooled your jets and waited.

• Freeway or major highway exits that don’t offer an immediate way back on to aforementioned highway or freeway. Having zoned out on my way to take a friend to the airport recently, I slid off one exit too soon and wandered through an east Vancouver neighborhood for 20 minutes trying to get back to the big asphalt. What they need is a GPS with a voice that shrieks “You’re taking the wrong exit, numbskull.”

• Electronic music. I’m sorry, but it takes no talent to program a computer to repeat the same series of synthesized drum rhythms from now until the end of time. One of our water aerobics instructors favors this insult to music lovers during her deep water workouts and I have to fight the urge to tear off my flotation device, sink to the bottom of the pool and stay there.

• Food manufacturers who try to jack their profit margins by whittling down package sizes. Did you know ice cream no longer comes in a half gallon? Instead, you’re buying 1.75 quart containers. Note to the folks at the Tillamook creamery. Charge me an extra 25 cents and put the ice cream in half gallons like God intended them to be.

There’s more but I’ll save it for the next meeting. Hopefully I can include some of your faves.

Things you hate to admit

By Michael Nettleton 


If you’re a lifelong hacker on the golf course, as I am, it’s time for an honesty check. 

When Jordan Spieth, mounting another superhuman effort to lead the Master’s tournament by five strokes with only nine holes to play, stepped up to the eleventh tee, no bookie on the face of the earth would have taken an even money bet he wouldn’t cruise to his second win in a row at Augusta. And then on number ten an errant tee shot and a bogie. Okay, okay, so pobody’s nerfect. And a missed save on number eleven and the lead is cut to three. Still, the kid’s a machine, he’ll right the ship. Probably make two or three birdies on the way back to the clubhouse. And then. . . 

 Number twelve, a picturesque and relatively short par three over a stream.

Splash

Splash again

Into the sand, out of the sand. Two putts. Mark a quadruple bogey seven on the score card and put him three shots back on the leader board to a British kid who sounds like he just stepped out of the cast of the road show version of Oliver. Superman became Clark Kent before our very eyes. 

To his credit, Spieth made a valiant run to stage a comeback and handled the post tournament dog and pony show with a modicum of grace.  Tough to do when your world has blown up in your face.  At 22, a class act, that kid. I personally, would have snapped every club in my bag over my knee. 

Here’s where the honesty check comes in. Wasn’t there a part of you, a small green monster of envy and spite who was jumping up in the air and shouting “Yesssssss!” when Spieth melted down?

Because, for all of us who’ve been there (repeatedly for us weekenders) there’s reassurance in knowing that even the best in the world—people who’ve been playing since infancy, taken hundreds of hours of lessons and have an innate athletic ability we can only dream about—can go gunnysack just like we do. 

So, for those of us who’ve taken four shots to get out of a sand trap followed by four putts, thrown a gutter ball when our team needed five pins to win against our arch rivals, let a pop fly drop in front of us on the softball field, said exactly the wrong thing to that guy or girl we wanted to impress or forgotten our lines at a crucial moment during the big community theater production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, we can feel Jordan’s pain. And we thank him for helping us feel a little less terminally inept than nature has made us.  

My fantasy life becomes a book

There has been all kinds of speculation about why people write stories. But most would agree that it's a way for them to work through unresolved personal issues, gain perspective on the events of their lives and, in some cases, wreak revenge on people who have wronged them by using fictional characters as catharsis. I co-wrote The Hermit of Humbug Mountain because of a night of terror (all created by the overactive imagination of the precocious 9-year old me) spent wandering around lost on an Oregon Coastal headland. 

Shotgun Start, my hard-boiled detective novel set on the high desert of New Mexico, is, in part, the fulfillment of a life-long fantasy--to be skilled enough at a sport to compete at the highest levels. I have to confess, I have recurring dreams about soaring above the rim and over the hands of the athletic giants of the NBA. Mike Nettleton, the greatest six-foot tall, white, non-jumping power forward in the history of the game, that's me. At 62, I still fantasize about throwing a curve-ball that fools even the most accomplished hitters in major league baseball. A-Rod. Whiff. Ichiro?--sit down bud !!! And golf? I'm totally delusional. 

I've played the game since I was twelve years old, taken lessons from a dozen pros, all of whom, after taking a look at my swing would shake their heads and ask me if I'd considered taking up bowling. "At least you don't have to go look for the ball," one of them told me. As hard as I've worked at it and as much as I practice, I'm only a slightly-above average golfer. Depending, of course on your definition of average.

Creating the character of Neal Egan for Shotgun Start let me live vicariously, as the disgraced former cop hustles rich suckers on the tightly manicured fairways of the country clubs and resort courses of central New Mexico. Neal's talent is offset by the disaster that is his personal life and the danger he faces when his ex-wife's lover is shotgunned to death and the police believe he might be an accomplice. His inability to stay out of the investigation leads him into a world of murderous bikers, the methamphetamine trade, internet pornography and the Mexican Mafia. 


Here's a question for you. What is your longest held secret fantasy? What would you have liked to have done, that you never had the chance (or ability) to do? Would love to hear about it.

In Defense of Golf

The only time in our 28 year relationship that I ever manhandled my wife came during a visit to a golf "superstore" in Albuquerque. I'd gone in to scope out a new set of clubs I lusted after and since Carolyn happened to be with me, she allowed as how she'd come in and "look around a little."

Understand, my wife does not understand my life long love affair with the game of golf.  She would agree with Mark Twain who once said: "Golf is a good walk, spoiled." When others of our acquaintance ask if she plays, she always says: "If I'm going to pay for real estate, I'm going to damn well own it."

To her credit, she at least tolerates my addiction and politely asks, when I come home from walking eighteen holes: "How did you play?"  I'm sure an answer like "Great," or "Good," "Bad," or even "Okay," would more than suffice for her to feel she'd fulfilled her spousal supportiveness obligation for the week. But as any linkster knows, there is no simple answer to that question. I usually generate a nonsensical overshare that sounds something like: "So I had a twisting twelve-footer at number fourteen and I was sure it would break at least eighteen inches right then start up the slope to"—I can see her eyes begin to glaze over and her mind hop a bus to another mental area code. The only other time her facial expression approximates this is when she answers the door to find a missionary proffering brochures and promises of eternal life.

Back at the mega-golf mart I heft a set of Ping irons and cast an eye around the store for Carolyn. She's standing near a rack of golf shirts, holding a particularly egregious fuchsia-tinted polka-dotted number at arms length and trying to stifle an explosion of laughter with the palm of her hand. A smarter man would have made his move right then, hustling her out to the car and planning a solitary return trip to look at the clubs later. But I didn't.

Maybe my golf infatuation is just a part of my Karma. On the day I was born, November 7, 1948, my father was employed as a greens keeper at Glendoveer Golf Club in Portland, Oregon.  He didn't play the game. In fact, as a life long working class guy, he felt golf was an affectation of  the idle rich as a part of their efforts to look down their noses at "ordinary people." He'd taken the course maintenance gig after his doctor told him if he spent another year in the copper polishing plant, his lungs would shrivel up and turn to dust. Dad took the doc's advice to heart and hired on to start mowing greens at four in the morning, staying just ahead of the crack-of-dawn types trying for a fast eighteen before work. As it turned out, the job suited him. He enjoyed the early morning solitude, the smell of freshly mowed grass and laughing at the spastic flailing of the less coordinated members of the crack-of-dawn foursomes. As we all know, Golf spelled backwards is flog. Which, for some of us, describes what we do as we try to make stick hit ball.

Back at the golf shop, Carolyn is now in full dudgeon, pulling all manner of golf slacks, sweater, knickers, vests and socks out, pointing at them, slapping her knee with her palm and making sputtering noises. Drool is beginning to leak ever so gently from the corner of her mouth. She's seconds away from totally losing it. I really have to get her out of there. But . . . I look longingly at the perfectly balanced four iron. Just a couple more waggles. Just a quick imagining of myself setting up for my second shot on the torturous dogleg left par five 10th hole at Arroyo Del Oso.

Golf is no longer a game for elites, although there are country clubs where snobbishness flourishes. I share my father's disdain for those exclusive facilities, agreeing totally with Groucho Marx's sentiment that "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members." I play at many of the affordable public links in the Portland area and enjoy meeting a wide variety of regular people who share my sickness. I enjoy the walk, the air, the challenge and the Zen of the game and hold strong opinions about the way it should be played. Among my convictions:

• Motorized golf carts are an abomination. Unless your doctor orders you to ride, you should walk. It's indicative of our culture that four pot-gutted thirty somethings riding around the course with a case of beer can claim they're out for exercise. 

• If someone's cell phone goes off on the course, the offender should immediately be flogged by the other members of his foursome with their golf towels and his smart phone given a swimming lesson at the nearest water hazard.

• If you spend most of your time on the course angry at yourself for playing badly, you should give the game up. Don't you get enough stress at work and at home? Breathe deeply, hit the ball, go to where you hit it and hit it again. The game is inherently ludicrous. Revel in the stupidity.

• You won't hit the ball any better with a $400 dollar driver than with a $7 Goodwill bargain bin club. You could set Tiger Woods up with a set from a garage sale and he'd still make a run at winning the Masters with them. Plus, his ex-wife could thump his cheating melon with a forty-year old rusty Sarazen eight-iron as well as with a kiln-forged, atomic thrust, molybdenum core "scary long" three-hundred dollar hybrid iron. 

• Don't lie about your score. None of your friends care that you got a nine instead of a seven on that tough par four. And you'll always know you cheated. At a recent PGA event, a talented young player took a nineteen on one hole. It made me smile to hear the audio tape of him trying to make a final count of his strokes after the hole had ended. He was laughing and taking it in stride. And it was costing him substantial money. Bottom line. It's only a number. Who cares?

The moment has arrived. Carolyn is on the floor of the golf emporium, laughing, coughing, hiccupping and snorting simultaneously, tears running down her cheeks in a torrent—thrashing her arms and legs up and down—occasionally stopping to point up at a violet and green striped pair of polyester pants hanging from a rack nearby. She is incapable of speech, reduced to fits of uncontrollable laughter and gasping. I'm afraid she'll swallow her tongue.

"Time to go, dear." I pick her up as gently as possible, throw her over my shoulder and start for the door. As the sliding electric eye doors snick open I toss back a John Belushi-esque "sorry" over my shoulder at the gaping clerks and customers who've stopped to watch the spectacle. Carolyn continues out of control, beating her fists on my back as waves of laughter send shudders throughout her body. I know, at that moment, that I'll never be able to return to that store again. In fact my name and description will probably be distributed to every outlet that sells golf equipment and clothing throughout the city. I sense I'll know first hand what India's untouchable caste feels like.

It occurs to me that I titled this blog "In Defense of Golf," and really haven't made much of a case, have I? Well, here goes.

During a recent round (on the first sunny day we've enjoyed since last October) I was fishing stray golf balls out of a water hazard when it occurred to me. If you go bowling and take your own ball, you'll come back with one ball. (Unless the machine eats it, which happened to me once). If you play softball, you'll return home with the same bats, gloves and balls you started with. But with golf, if you keep your eye peeled in the long grass and water, you may end up on the plus side of the ledger. Thus, golf is the only participation sport where you stand a chance of ending up with more equipment than you started with. If that's not a reason to take up the game, I don't know what is.